Past Comparison Quotes

It's very shocking for me to see pictures from my win here in 2008. I aged.

We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

People who say that yesterday was better than today are ultimately devaluing their own existence.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage - it’s okay for clothes not that great for people

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

So much of what we understand comes from knowing what something is and what that something used to be, which allows us to figure out, or at least imagine, what happened in between.

Football has evolved, you can't compare with the past.

People refer to 'the good ol' days', but I don't know what they're talking about. As someone who's battled cancer, if I lived more than 20 years ago, I'd be a dead man.

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

When I think about, say, 1995, or whever the last moment was before most of us were on the internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. ... Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A few hours wasn't such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people or your trivia.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.

In 50 years, I don't think you're gonna look back at 2006 and say, 'The good old days.'

The quality of ownership is not what it was in yesteryear.

How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

It's not like I'm all into nostalgia and history, it's just that I can't stand the way things are now

Nothing's new since Genesis. And so everybody in their life thinks history began when they were born. Most people's historical perspective happened when they were born in the sense that nothing has ever been this bad. "We've never gone before this before," and of course we have. Things have been worse in many ways in the country.

I don't think we need to deal with just one thing. Look at where we are now compared to where we were when he [Barack Obama] walked into office. It's not a happy path.

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.

It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy.

We are always taking a hard look at how life was in the past in coming up with interesting subject matter for our various series, and remembering how much I used to want an encyclopedia as a kid made me realize wanting a set is very unlikely for teens today, and that conversation would be interesting.

We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.